Politics

In Tel Aviv, the gloomy Ezra hires foreign workers without permits to build an addition to a homely block of flats, where his ex-wife Mali lives with her current lover Ilan. Ezra and Mali's young son Eyal hates the army and is AWOL, living among prostitutes and drug dealers. Gabi, a beautiful young woman who's a friend of Mali's, is carrying on an affair with Hezi, an older man insisting on secrecy. Hezi rents an apartment at the building for their trysts. Neighbors complain about the noise of their lovemaking and of the construction. Lives in this apartment complex revolve slowly one around another, and in Israeli society, "Everyone's out for himself".

This documentary examines the 100-year history of Israel's kibbutz movement, recreating its glorious past and chronicling its recent decline. The kibbutz movement was a successful experiment in pure communism, but can it keep going? Can it get through the trails of being radically socialist in a capitalist world? The film focuses on the heartbreak and hope of the modern kibbutz as a new generation struggles to ensure its survival.

This sharp, often hilarious satire that became the most successful film in Israeli history, is about new immigrants Sallah and his family, who are left in a shack near their promised apartment and are abandoned for months. A Yemenite Jewish family that was flown to Israel during "Operation Magic Carpet"--a clandestine operation that flew 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel the year after the state was formed--is forced to move to a government settlement camp. The patriarch of the family, portrayed by Chaim Topol, tries to make money and get better housing, in a country that can barely provide for its own and is in the midst absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. This hilarious portrayal of immigrants in Israel won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, putting Israel on the international film stage for the first time.

Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of seven Romanian dwarves in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni's cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women's rights, free love and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik's life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever. Avi Nesher's latest film mixes comedy with drama as it tells a coming-of-age story unlike any you've ever seen before.